20 word description: A simple classifieds marketplace which helps small companies and entrepreneurs find matching partners for cross-promotion and marketing.

CEO's 100 word description: One of the main hurdles in making effective cross-promotion deals is finding the right partners. This basic marketplace helps you to find companies who target a similar market to yours and are willing to close cross-promotion deals. By posting a classified, companies can significantly reduce the time and effort needed to find their match. And then the cross-promotion bonanza can begin.

Sam, the founder used to try his hand at cross-promotion dealmaking at eBay. When leaving for greener shores, he just couldn't help himself and made his own little marketplace. There are just a couple of hundred of cross-promotion ads right now but Sam is convinced this could be the beginning of something nice.

Mashable's Take: You scratch my back, I scratch yours. That's a very common, unspoken rule of the land, no matter what industry you're talking about. No matter how small the favor, there's always a way you can work with somebody so that you can both come out ahead. What those benefits express on each end, however, often comes down to your bartering skills and what you have to offer. Different versions of this have come about in the form of various online marketplaces, such as link-swapping sites. Most of these offer a standard rate of exchange, however, and don't leave much wiggle room for the individual parties. IntroNiche is hoping to change all that.

Founded by Sam Desimpel, a former eBay employee who spent all his time working out mutually beneficial deals between the online auction company and trade organizations, IntroNiche has created an open market system that is built around classifieds from individual parties. Anyone seeking a deal for any type of promotional purpose can post their needs on IntroNiche and seek out others that may be a good fit.

The desired result would be a marketing tool that gets these individual parties in front of niche audiences across the Web. The necessity in such a system, however, is critical mass. IntroNiche must scale to a pretty large and prolific user base in order to garner any major benefits as a self-sustaining marketplace. The other necessity, especially once critical mass is achieved, is search and filtering.

IntroNiche has begun to address this with a tiered search option on the left-hand side of the page, allowing you to search by region, language, market and industry type. I think, in the end, such an open-ended market will still need some sort of standardization, even if it's only by way of a trust-based system that helps users indicate which parties have built a good reputation for this cross-promotional network.

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